Celia Fisher, Ph.D., knew she was onto something in 1997 when she asked Joseph M. McShane S.J., president of Fordham who was then dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, to fund a series of faculty seminars around the topic of ethics. In 1999, the success of those seminars led to the creation of the Center for Ethics Education.

Twenty years later, Fisher, the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics, says she’s still amazed at what the center has accomplished. The center, which received initial funding from the National Institute of Health and Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, currently oversees educational programs on the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate level. It has produced over 200 publications and has received a total of $11 million to conduct research supporting the rights and welfare of vulnerable populations. For the past eight years, it has also administered the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute.

Interdisciplinary From the Start

Fisher said one of the center’s greatest points of pride has been its interdisciplinary focus.

“The center’s success was built on the support, encouragement, and involvement of faculty of all the different schools and programs at Fordham,” she said.

“To be able to put all that together with the support of an interdisciplinary faculty, advisers, and teachers has been an incredibly wonderful experience.”

From the very beginning, Fisher, whose background is in psychology, has had two associate directors hailing from the theology and philosophy departments. Curran Center for Catholic Studies Director Christina Firer Hinze, Ph.D., represented theology when the Center for Ethics Education started and was followed by Barbara Andolsen. Currently, the position is held by theology professor Thomas Massaro, S.J.

Michael Baur, Ph.D., an associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of law, joined in 1999 as associate director and never left. It helps, he said, that he is “constitutionally built” to be interdisciplinary.

“For those who are predisposed to think beyond boundaries, the center provides a huge playground of full opportunities to think creatively about different disciplines,” he said.

“The center has made it really easy for me to start conversations with people I never would have spoken with about economics, psychology, biology, and neurosciences.”

In 1999, Baur recalled, the goal of the center was to create a space for crossing boundaries to address ethics and being open to whatever came along as a result. The interdisciplinary minor in bioethics, which was first offered to undergraduates in 2013, is an example of how the center has evolved to meet the needs of students.

“We already had the goodwill and the communications among different faculty. We didn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Debating Issues of the Times

When it comes to public programming, the center, which kicked off its 20th-anniversary celebration with a March 7 lecture titled “Ethics and the Digital Life,” has hosted events dedicated to nearly every thorny issue debated in the United States today.

Its first public event was an April 2000 workshop titled “The Ethics of Mentoring: Faculty and Student Obligations.” In a lecture four years later, Christian ethics professor Margaret Farley, Ph.D. weighed in on the use of human embryonic stem cells in research. The drug industry was the focus of a 2005 forum, “Bio-Pharmaceuticals and Public Trust,” and in 2012, the center co-sponsored “Money, Media and the Battle for Democracy’s Soul,” where former Senator Russ Feingold issued an ominous warning about the role of money in politics.

In 2013, a conference tackled the uncomfortable reality that the United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population, but is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s prison population. Four years later, the center’s decision to co-sponsor “In Good Conscience: Human Rights in an Age of Terrorism, Violence and Limited Resources,” proved prescient, with the actual lecture coming two weeks after terrorist attacks in Brussels.

For Fisher, one of the most emotional events was “Moral Outrage and Moral Repair: Reflections on 9/11 and Its Afterlife,” a daylong conference co-organized with Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture in April 2011.

“It was so moving. We had clerics from all different religions, we had philosophers talking about forgiveness, all sides of it. We had survivors and families of survivors. It was such an emotional experience,” she said.

A Flexible Master’s Program

The center’s efforts are not confined to lectures and panels. In 2009, at the suggestion of former Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Nancy Busch Rossnagel, Ph.D., the center began offering a Master of Arts in ethics and society under the direction of Adam Fried, Ph.D, GSAS’ 13, 17. It is now overseen by Rimah Jaber, GSAS’ 16.

Yohan Garcia, GSAS ’18, one of the program’s 57 alumni, recently accepted a position as national formation coordinator for the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Pastoral Migratoria (Migration Ministry) program.

A native of Mexico who moved to the Belmont neighborhood in 2003, Garcia earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Hunter College in 2015. In 2013, he attended a spiritual retreat and realized he wanted to incorporate his faith into his studies. As a Fordham master’s student, he took classes such as Natural Law (at the Law School); Race, Gender and the Media; and Introduction to Thomas Aquinas. Today, he’s able to apply what he learned in each of those courses to his work around immigration.

Although he’s only just started his job in Chicago, he’s already considering applying to Ph.D. programs.

“When it comes to issues like immigration, there’s no easy solution,” he said.

“We all have a different idea of the common good, but at the end of the day, as a society, we have to work toward a common goal that will benefit all of us. Listening is a great skill and a gift to have when it comes to this issue.”

HIV Research Training

Faith Fletcher, Ph.D., an assistant professor of health behavior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, completed training with the HIV and Drug Abuse Prevention Research Ethics Training Institute (RETI) in 2016. The institute, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has to date provided over 42 early career professionals in the social, behavioral, medical, and public health fields with an opportunity to gain research ethics training.

A native of Thibodaux, Louisiana, who was one of the first students to pursue a bioethics minor as an undergraduate at Tuskegee University, she has focused on the ethics of engagement with African American women living with HIV.

“Before coming to the research ethics training institute, I had training in both bioethics and public health, but I really struggled with finding the academic spaces, and even the language to combine these disciplinary areas,” Fletcher said.

“The institute is definitely the highlight of my academic career.”

Because she works with marginalized populations, Fletcher said her biggest challenge is avoiding situations that jeopardize the safety of them or researchers. It’s a real issue, as researchers engaged in qualitative research sometimes conduct interviews in vehicles, bars, and other unorthodox places to make sure the people they are interviewing are not further stigmatized.

“What I’ve learned from the training is we have to rely on research participants as research ethics experts, because they have these daily experiences with stigma, and are skilled at navigating and circumventing stigma. These are the individuals we have to go to as we’re designing our research ethics protocols,” she said.

It’s humbling work, and Fletcher said the women she’s interviewed have taught her much about resiliency.

“I’ve learned so much about the way that they’re able to navigate through society despite high levels of stigma and stress, and the way they’ve coped with it, risen above it, and not allowed it to define them,” she said.

“I’m thankful for them allowing me into their spaces, because not only does it enhance my research, but I’ve grown personally from their stories.”

Protecting the rights and welfare of vulnerable populations has been a common theme running through the centers’ NIH-sponsored research. For instance, Fisher was the principal investigator on a 4-year series of studies designed to reduce the burden of HIV among young sexual and gender minority youth.  The results of one of these studies were published in the journal AIDS and Behavior.

In 2014, based on a project supported by the Fordham’s HIV, Research Ethics Institute, Cynthia Pearson, Ph.D., was awarded a grant, along with Fisher, to adapt a culturally specific ethics training course for American Indian and Alaska Natives populations. Fisher also led a study in 2006 to assess and develop procedures to enhance the capacity of adults with mild and moderate mental retardation to provide informed consent for therapeutic research; the results were published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

A Shared Dedication to Social Justice

Going forward, Fisher said she wants to expand the involvement of the faculty and alumni in center programming, recruit more international students, and establish a research center on health disparities among marginalized populations.

Since its beginnings, the Center has been grounded in Fordham University’s commitment to intellectual excellence, human dignity, and the common good. The success of the center, she said, is due in no small part to the breadth and depth of Fordham’s faculty dedication to these ideals.

“Faculty, students, and administrators share this dedication to social justice and helping others that just implicitly supports what we’re doing. So, when we reach out to faculty, they are already providing students with the tools for critical and compassionate engagement in creating a just world,” she said.

“They may not do work in ethics per se, but the way they think, because they’re at Fordham, they are committed to caring for the least among us.”

Thankfully, Fordham professor Michael Baur, Ph.D. has helped to make Hegel’s worldview more accessible. G.W.F. Hegel: Key Concepts (Routledge, 2014), which Baur edited, provides an introduction to both Hegel’s thought and the later philosophical movements that Hegel inspired.

“Hegel was a very comprehensive and systematic thinker, [so]in order to grasp the full meaning of any particular part within Hegel’s system, it is necessary to appreciate the context of the whole,” writes Baur, an associate professor of philosophy and adjunct professor at Fordham Law.

“[In addition,] Hegel developed his innovative and systematic philosophy in continuous dialogue with his own contemporaries. Thus, in order to understand Hegel, it is necessary also to understand the historical context within which, and in response to which, Hegel was developing his own philosophical views.”

The book is divided into two parts. First, it covers the main philosophical themes Hegel addresses, namely, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethical theory, political philosophy, philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of history.

The second section deals with post-Hegelian movements in philosophy, including Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, hermeneutics, and French post-structuralism.

G.W.F. Hegel his the shelves this week. Click here to read the publisher’s synopsis of the book.

If a tree falls on you in the woods and nobody sees it, have you been wronged?

You might have been harmed, but you would probably not accuse the tree of violating your human rights by falling over and crushing you. Unless, that is, you believe that rights are non-relational—then you might have some trouble getting the tree off the hook.

These are the kind of puzzles on which Michael Baur, Ph.D., a lawyer, an associate professor of philosophy, and an adjunct professor at Fordham School of Law, is an expert. His research pivots on the question of what is society, or, in philosophical language, social ontology. According to the philosophies Baur studies—medieval philosophy and 19th-century German philosophy—societies have a kind of being or reality of their own, which is generated by interactions among members of that society.

Put more concretely, the humans who enter into society agree to certain social norms—whether written or unwritten—that make the society run smoothly. Without humans, these norms, rules, and other social constructs created to order society would not exist.

“One example of this is money,” Baur said. “You might think that you have money if you have a piece of paper in your pocket. But if every human being disappeared or was lobotomized and suddenly didn’t know what money is, you don’t have money anymore. You just have a piece of paper. The idea of money is dependent upon a set of interactions imbued with human understanding about what these interactions mean.”

However, many contemporary thinkers don’t explicitly adhere to this philosophy. Much modern thought characteristically presumes that reality exists only outside of, and independent of, the human mind. So when it comes to the law, these thinkers argue that what the law upholds and protects—rights, for instance—is independent of human interactions. As a result, rights would continue to exist even if there were no humans living in society to observe them.

Baur argues, however, that it is wrong to regard rights as non-relational. Like laws and social conventions, rights only exist because humans interact in certain ways. He offered the example of property rights.

“The ordinary person usually thinks that if you possess something, you have property. But you can have possession of something without having property in it. For example, the parking lot attendant has possession of my car right now, but it’s not his property. Likewise, I have property [of my car], but it’s not in my possession,” he said.

“If you’re in the wild with no other human beings, you can have possession of, say, a hunk of food. But it’s possible to have property only if there’s a system of interactions animated by human understanding.”

It’s an idea that traces back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and the 19th-century German philosopher Karl Marx, who both argued that property is not a relation between people and things, but a relation between people and other people with respect to things. In other words, property is a social construct.

The difference is subtle, but it is important when it comes to justifying concepts such as taxation and eminent domain, as these rely on the understanding that property exists in the context of a society—not independent of it.

“Judges [who]uphold a view of property that is totally non-relational have a very hard time trying to explain how there can be the taking of property under eminent domain,” Baur said. “When it comes to fundamental issues in the law, if you haven’t clarified your concepts, then… [it’s] is going to cause incoherence and contradiction.”

One such quandary came with the Supreme Court’s recent decision to uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act, particularly the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Classified as a regulation, the mandate seemed unconstitutional because it forced people to participate in a market in which they were not participating. As a result, the court upheld the mandate as a tax.

But according to Baur, who wrote about the decision on his blog, the mandate could have been upheld as a commercial regulation because of the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires every hospital in the United States to treat any individual who seeks care in an emergency room. With this “right to be treated,” Baur argued, everyone in the United States has a kind of health insurance.

“That means they’re not legally or commercially inert,” he said. “They’re possessors of a legally enforceable right, a kind of insurance.

“That’s really where I see my work. It’s not in the everyday applications of the law, because, for the most part, those work. It’s in clarifying the concepts that could otherwise lead to problems in the applications.”

Baur is also director of the Natural Law Colloquium, a joint effort between the philosophy department and law school. Each semester, the colloquium sponsors lectures and debates on the natural law tradition, which points to a necessary connection between the law and morality.

The colloquium enacts what Baur already embodies—genuine, interdisciplinary dialogue, which Baur considers a critical part of academic inquiry.

“I want [lawyers and philosophers]to be talking across the boundaries of their disciplines to see the reciprocal limitations of their own discipline,” he said. “That goes not only for philosophy and law, but for every discipline. If you’re locked only in your discipline, you run the risk of being narrow and dogmatic about it.”

Graduate students and scholars from around the world convened at Fordham on Feb. 24 and 25 for the Fordham Philosophical Society’s fifth biennial international graduate conference.

Hosted by Fordham’s Department of Philosophy, “The Truth of Ethics” attracted attendees from as far as Amiens, France to present at the two-day conference.

Delivering the conference’s plenary lecture, “The Truth about Rights,” Associate Professor of Philosophy Michael Baur, Ph.D., argued for the utilitarian notion that rights are meaningful only within social contexts. Rights do not exist in a vacuum, he said, but rather exist because there are individuals who live in community as equals, and who are entitled to certain things.

“To possess a right… is not to possess a power or liberty or natural property, such as the property of having earlobes or kneecaps, that one would possess apart from any relation to others. Rather, to possess a right is to occupy a place within an order of justice, according to which two or more individuals are related to one another as equals in some relevant aspect,” Baur said.

He pointed out, however, that utilitarians also argue that rights are not guaranteed.

“Even if there is such a thing as ‘rights,’ these utilitarians argue, such rights—including even the ‘right to life’—are necessarily relational, and thus have meaning only within the context of a larger social whole,” Baur said. “As a result, the argument goes, the supposed ‘rights’ possessed by individual human beings are never inviolable or unconditional, but instead are always negotiable and subject to being ‘traded away’ for the sake of greater social utility.”

However, he said, the premise that rights are relational does not necessarily mean that rights are therefore negotiable. A social community might take away a certain good if there is an urgent reason to do so, but the individual’s right to that good still remains, he said.

For example, if members of the criminal justice system take away a convicted criminal’s freedom, it does not mean that the criminal justice system has the ability to take away the overall right to freedom.

The conference keynote lecture was delivered by Stephen Darwall, Ph.D., the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Michigan.

Darwall’s lecture, “Morality’s Distinctiveness,” challenged participants to think critically about the concept of “morality,” which often is used interchangeably with the term “ethics.”

“We can use ‘moral’ and ‘morality’ in any way we like, but though the terms are sometimes used broadly as synonyms for ‘ethical’ and ‘ethics,’ the sense I have in mind here is… morality’s ‘narrow sense,’” he said.

According to Darwall, the concept of morality has been in contention for millennia. In the end, though, our modern concept of morality has ultimately become juridical. Specifically, we largely view the concept as involving a strong connection between our moral obligations and being accountable to these obligations.

In addition to the Department of Philosophy, the conference was sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate Student Association, the Fordham Philosophical Society, the Office of the Provost, the International Philosophical Quarterly, and the Center for Ethics Education.